Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Steal My Book

I wouldn’t have known about my Russian pirate translator had I not set a Google Alert for the title of my debut novel when it was published, in April 2011. Over the following year, the alerts inevitably, depressingly became more infrequent. Worse still, they began to occasionally refer to eBay sales (“Like New!” “Unread!”). The title, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, began to seem freshly ironic, given the circumstances.

But in March, the alerts began pointing me to a message board on WordReference.com. There, a user with the handle AlexanderIII, who gave his location as Moscow, was regularly seeking help understanding my unusual word choices. He wanted to know, for example, what I had meant when I described the interior of a Bolivian hotel with 1970s decor as having “cucumber walls.” He wondered if that might mean that the walls had the texture of a cucumber, or maybe, he offered inexplicably, it meant that the walls were paisley. Fortunately, a user with a teddy-bear avatar cleared things up:

se16teddy: I don’t associate the paisley pattern with cucumbers at all. I suppose it must be the colour: it is quite common to describe colours in terms of a familiar fruit (orange, peach, plum, apple, aubergine, …)

In another post, AlexanderIII cited a passage in which I described my protagonist waking up with his “hair askew, eyes puffy with sleep.” Did “hair askew” refer to a particular hairstyle, he wanted to know, or did the character just have bed head? A user with the handle Copyright—the irony of which I did not yet appreciate—assured him that sleep was to blame. At first, I didn’t realize that AlexanderIII was translating the book; I thought he was just a fastidious Russian reader with a loose command of the English language. It was fun to see people debating the meanings of my thoroughly worked-over phrases. After a few days, a member going by DocPenfro encouraged AlexanderIII to simply enjoy the book and not fret over all the details. AlexanderIII responded, “I’d love to, DocPenfro, but I’m translating it for a publisher so I must be sure.”Holy crap, I thought, my book is going to be published in Russia! Then I remembered that no Russian publisher had acquired the rights, and realized that AlexanderIII must be translating it for some kind of book-pirating outfit. In the U.S., book piracy is a growing problem. But Russia, I learned, has a remarkably mature black market for literature—particularly for ebooks, no doubt in part because the overhead is so low. Pirated books reportedly compose up to 90 percent of Russian ebook downloads. According to Rospechat, the state agency that regulates mass media, Russians have access to more than 100,000 pirated titles and just 60,000 legitimate titles, with illegal downloads costing legitimate vendors several billion rubles a year. Of course, I wish one of Russia’s two major ebook publishers had given me a couple thousand dollars for the rights, but neither did. Like many novelists I know, I’m just happy to have people reading my work, whether they’re paying me for it or not. I’m also heartened that Russians care enough about reading to sustain a robust literary black market. In the U.S., you get the feeling that hardly anyone is creating pirated ebooks because—well, who’d buy such a thing?Full essay at The Atlantic